A month before turning 34, I received an unexpected birthday gift: a cloud-connected pacemaker. It sits in a tiny pocket in the left side of my chest, just above my heart. Silently and diligently, the device emits electrical pulses to make sure my heart rate never again plummets below 25 beats per minute.

The idea of a battery-equipped, internet-connected device living forever inside my chest both terrifies and fascinates me. When people say, “I’ll die if I lose my iPhone,” they never mean it literally. But I really might die without this smart gadget. I’m also at risk in other ways. A wireless pacemaker can be hacked, or, as recently happened in Ohio, become legal evidence that incriminates its user.

There is a crucial difference between my device and more ubiquitous digital technologies: I never made the choice to implant the pacemaker in my body. I’m grateful to the hardworking doctors who minimized my pain and helped me get better. At the same time, the device they installed raises questions that now haunt me. It’s not clear who might have access to data about my pulse, my health, and possibly my whereabouts—data generated by a device inside me.

* * *

Arriving at the ICU with a dangerously slow pulse, I was alarmed to find out I was suffering from a life-threatening condition called complete heart block. Learning that treatment would require a permanent pacemaker was no less of a surprise. I have nothing in common with the 76-year-old poster boy of pacemaker research, the former vice president Dick Cheney. Like Cheney, who survived five heart attacks, most pacemaker users are elderly—not grad students in their early 30s.

This might explain why the manufacturer of my pacemaker, the large medical-device company Medtronic, boasts that the device can be monitored remotely by health-care providers or worried family members. This tracking capacity could assuage anxiety, but it also raises some concerns about privacy and longevity.

Since the pacemaker was approved for Medicare reimbursement in 1966, there has been a sharp rise in the number of medical conditions that might lead to its installation. In 1984, treatment guidelines from the American College of Cardiology called pacemakers at least a “reasonable” tool for treating 56 heart conditions. By 2008, the list had expanded to 88. Between 1993 and 2009, nearly 3 million Americans had pacemakers implanted.

Despite the growing number of pacemakers, not to mention the recent introduction of wireless cardiovascular devices like mine, their long-term effects, risks, and proprietary design are rarely discussed with new patients or their family members. Lior Jankelson, a physician at New York University’s cardiac-electrophysiology center, told me that every new pacemaker implanted in the United States is cloud-connected. “As a result,” Jankelson explains, “there are at least tens of thousands of Americans with cloud-connected devices that could be monitored from afar.” First, let’s save your life, the medical establishment might surmise, and later we can chitchat about how having a wireless, subdermal implant for the rest of that life might expose you to hacking, infections, and other health hazards.

My tiny device constantly collects data, which is automatically sent to my bedside monitor whenever my doctors schedule a remote-monitoring appointment. During these appointments, which take place every four to six months, the monitor sends my metrics to a secure server. A doctor examines the transmitted data and notifies me by phone if any further action is needed. The patient manual explains it like this: “Sending heart-device information using wireless technology does not require you to interact with your monitor. The process is silent and invisible. Clinics typically schedule the automatic process to occur while you sleep.”

That language is meant to reassure me that living with a wireless pacemaker is an effortless endeavor. But to me, the idea that my hidden chest box “talks” to others in my sleep is the stuff of nightmares. What is the device sending to the cloud, and what is the cloud sending back to it? It is impossible to know for sure whether my data is protected. As the security researcher Marie Moe recently wrote in Wired, “Part of the problem with doing security research in this field is that the medical devices appear as black boxes. How can I trust the machine inside my body when it is running on proprietary code and there is no transparency?”

Moe mentions that in 2008, a group of researchers at the University of Michigan proved that it is possible to extract sensitive personal information from a pacemaker—or even to threaten the patient’s life by changing the pacing behavior or turning it off. Other medical devices are also vulnerable. In 2011, Jay Radcliffe, an independent security researcher, revealed a security vulnerability in a Medtronic insulin pump that could allow an attacker to take control of it.

Aware of these alarming scenarios, in 2013 Cheney told CBS’s 60 Minutes that his doctors disabled his wireless pacemaker to thwart hacking and to protect him from possible assassination attempts. Riffing on a fictional assassination by pacemaker depicted on the TV show Homeland, Cheney stated that he found the plotline to be “an accurate portrayal of what was possible.”

* * *

Health providers can review my data from afar, and unauthorized hackers might have access to it, too. But it proved surprisingly difficult to access these medical records myself. After calling both Medtronic and the hospital in which my pacemaker was implanted, I was told I would have to sign a release form and wait for its approval before the data could be sent to me (via postal mail, no less). The process might take several weeks, and I would have no way of knowing whether the delivered data would be partial or complete. Just as Google or Facebook retains more data than it reveals, so even gadgets inside one’s body are gradually shifting control of personal information from users to corporations.

Any downsides to this trend are repeatedly denied by the medical-device manufacturers and cardiologists I spoke with. When I asked a Medtronic representative if I had to take the monitor with me for a two-week trip to the Middle East, he tried to convince me to “sign up to our new mobile app, which lets you download the data via a small, handheld monitor.” It’s a relief that I can travel safely around the world, but the long-term risks of connected monitoring systems are not part of the doctor-patient conversation. My phone conversation with Medtronic reminded me of routine conversations with my internet or cable providers, when overworked and underpaid representatives desperately tried to sell me “our brand-new package” for a “once-in-a-lifetime deal.”

The potential threats posed by hackers are distressing, but so is the notion that my pulse has been monetized. Medtronic is a public company with 84,000 employees in about 160 countries, serving more than 50,000 patents. The company, which moved its headquarters from Minnesota to low-tax Ireland in 2015, defines making “a fair profit” as one of the goals in its official mission statement. With revenues totaling $10.5 billion from cardiac and vascular devices in 2017 alone, it seems to be succeeding.

Data monitoring is threatening because those subject to it don’t know what information is being collected, for what reason, and by whom. And unlike iPhone or Amazon Echo users, I cannot just choose to stop using my connected pacemaker. In a way, my heart is no longer entirely mine: I share it with both Medtronic and with the U.S. hospital in which it was implanted. As an immigrant in America at a time when foreign status is uncertain, I can’t help but wonder if my pulse might one day betray me. Might it show I visited a place I was not supposed to, or dared meet someone from a hostile country?

* * *

Alongside privacy and security, other concerns are equally frightening but more macabre. At 34, my biggest fear is that my pacemaker will stubbornly continue to beat my heart after my brain ceases to function. As the writer Katy Butler movingly described in a New York Times piece about her father’s final years, “If we did nothing, his pacemaker would not stop for years. Like the tireless charmed brooms in Disney’s Fantasia, it would prompt my father’s heart to beat after he became too demented to speak, sit up, or eat. It would keep his heart pulsing after he drew his last breath.”

As Butler reported, the Heart Rhythm Society and the American Heart Association have issued guidelines declaring that “patients or their legal surrogates have the moral and legal right to request the withdrawal of any medical treatment, including an implanted cardiac device.” Deactivating a pacemaker, the groups concluded, amounted neither to euthanasia nor assisted suicide. And yet, the notion of not being able to choose when to die haunts me. Even if a medical professional can non-intrusively deactivate my pacemaker, the thought that this decision might be left to my loved ones is heartbreaking. The connected nature of my device makes this fear even darker. Will my body continue to send data to the cloud even if my brain ceases to function? In the future, will it be possible to “deactivate” me from afar?

Given all the questions, an open, honest conversation about the real and possible impacts of connected medical devices is needed. Transparency from cardiologists, computer scientists, medical companies, and law makers is especially crucial since legislation on the matter has languished. Writing in Modern Health Care, Rachel Z. Arndt recently warned that cybersecurity vulnerabilities in networked medical devices could “wreak havoc” on health systems. Faced with growing security threats, many in the medical industry now call for a “software bill of materials” that would list all the software components in any wireless device.

Despite a 2014 bill requiring government agencies to get a complete list of the software components for new products, these efforts have not yet been implemented. Instead, according to Arndt, “the FDA recommends that manufacturers take cybersecurity into account when designing devices and continue to do so after the devices have been introduced.”

In the meantime, patients are left without answers. I woke up to a life that depends on a fancy metronome and the invisible infrastructure sustaining it: replaceable batteries, bedside monitors, secure servers, Wi-Fi connectivity. There are millions more people who depend on wireless medical implants, our bodies talking constantly to medical companies and data brokers. If our bodies can talk to them, it shouldn’t be outlandish to imagine they might return the favor.

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”

On Tuesday, the district attorney in Durham, North Carolina, dismissed all remaining charges in the August case. What does that mean for the future of statues around the country?

DURHAM, N.C.—“Let me be clear, no one is getting away with what happened.”

That was Durham County Sheriff Mike Andrews’s warning on August 15, 2017. The day before, a protest had formed on the lawn outside the county offices in an old courthouse. In more or less broad daylight, some demonstrators had leaned a ladder against the plinth, reading, “In memory of the boys who wore the gray,” and looped a strap around it. Then the crowd pulled down the statue, and it crumpled cheaply on the grass. It was a brazen act, witnessed by dozens of people, some of them filming on cell phones.

Andrews was wrong. On Tuesday, a day after a judge dismissed charges against two defendants and acquitted a third, Durham County District Attorney Roger Echols announced the state was in effect surrendering, dismissing charges against six other defendants.

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study finds that many household goods degrade air quality more than once thought.

On the final day of April 2010, unbeknownst to most locals, a small fleet of specialists and equipment from the U.S. government descended on the seas and skies around Los Angeles.

A “Hurricane Hunter” Lockheed P-3 flew in from Denver. The U.S. Navy vessel Atlantis loitered off the coast of Santa Monica. Orbiting satellites took special measurements. And dozens of scientists set up temporary labs across the basin, in empty Pasadena parking lots and at the peak of Mount Wilson.

This was all part of a massive U.S. government study with an ambitious goal: Measure every type of gas or chemical that wafted by in the California air.

Jessica Gilman, a research chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was one member of the invading horde. For six weeks, she monitored one piece of equipment—a kind of “souped-up, ruggedized” instrument—as it sat outside in Pasadena, churning through day and night, measuring the amount of chemicals in the air. It was designed to detect one type of air pollutant in particular: volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. VOCs are best known for their presence in car exhaust, but they are also found in gases released by common household products, like cleaners, house paints, and nail polish.

Outside powers have been central to the nuclear crisis—but for a few peculiar weeks in February.

Of all the arguments in favor of allowing North Korea to leap into the spotlight with South Korea at the Winter Olympics—what with its deceptively smiley diplomats and even more smiley cheerleaders and the world’s most celebrated winless hockey team—one hasn’t received much attention. “It’s tragic that people of shared history, blood, language, and culture have been divided through geopolitics of the superpowers,” Talia Yoon, a resident of Seoul, toldThe New York Times when the paper asked South Koreans for their thoughts on the rapprochement between North and South Korea at the Olympics. “Neither Korea has ever been truly independent since the division.”

In this telling, having Korean athletes march under a unification flag at the Opening Ceremony and compete jointly in women’s hockey isn’t just about the practical goal of ensuring the Games aren’t disrupted by an act of North Korean aggression, or the loftier objective of seizing a rare opportunity for a diplomatic resolution to the escalating crisis over Kim Jong Un’s nuclear-weapons program. It’s also about Koreans—for a couple surreal weeks in February, at least—plucking some control over that crisis from the superpowers that have been so influential in shaping it over the past year.